TARSHI’s Sexuality Counselling Skills Training focuses at enhancing capacities of practitioners, professionals and individuals working on gender and sexuality related issues with basic counselling skills that help them engage with people in a non-judgemental and approachable manner. Our training sessions are participatory and encourage healthy, mutual discussions with participants drawn from various fields of work. This course has an online as well as offline component that provides participants with a unique learning opportunity to do one part of the course at their own pace; reducing the number of days they need to spend on the on-site component. We conduct announced as well as on-demand trainings on counselling skills, some of which may be a part of consultancies depending on the demand and needs of the organisation for which the training has been organised.
What do these training sessions include?
The trainings usually include the components of
- introduction to counselling, key counselling skills (active listening, paraphrasing and reflecting, validating, being non-judgmental and maintaining boundaries),
- values clarification, ethics in practice,
- burnout prevention and counsellor care.
Past Programmes
A few organisations for which we have recently done trainings on counselling skills are IED, BRAC University, Dhaka, Gurgaon Ki Awaaz (Gurgaon, India), IPPF (South Asia Region), Jagori, New Delhi and WOREC, Nepal.
Examples of TARSHI’s offerings
- In April 2018, TARSHI organised Sexuality and Counselling Skills Training (SCST), with the objective to introduce basic counselling skills in the context of sexuality to practitioners, professionals and individuals working on gender and sexuality related issues. It included an online component (our two-part Basics and Beyond online course on sexuality and SRHR) and a face-to-face training that was held in April and had 11 participants.
- iCall helpline team based in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai,invited TARSHI to conduct a day-long session as part of their ‘Fostering Strengths’ workshop. These participants work with adolescents and young people in various capacities. The session covered the basics of gender, sexuality and SRHR, and included ‘tools’ and case studies to discuss these topics with young people in a rights-based manner.
- In 2020, we conducted Sexuality Counselling Skills Training in Delhi. The training had an online and on-site component and was attended by 12 participants including professional school counsellors and individuals working on SRHR.